Global Warming vis-a-vis Global Climate Change

It seems whenever some weather or news report crops up about record snow falls and winter storms in certain parts of the country, one will inevitably read some sort of fringe article that eventually springs up, proclaiming the end of global warming and how the theory can be officially debunked. It’s grown rather tiresome and annoying.

This article from NPR, titled “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat” frames this question in a new light. What exactly do we know and not know about global warming?

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

What we should be talking about instead of global warming, is global climate change. It’s no secret that as temperatures rise, it greatly affects climatic conditions throughout the world. This includes an increase in such things as rain and even snowfall. Personally, I think this term would do the science and research into these topics more justice. However, the term global warming is much more popular in our everyday lexicon than global climate change.

That said, here is an interesting site from the Environmental Protection Agency on global climate change.